I've long held that listening to the self-censoring corporate
mainstream media and Obama's smiling fascist government is like trying
to follow a novel with all the consonants and half the punctuation
missing. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's like trying to grope one's
way toward the denouement of an espionage thriller using a Mad Libs
book. Insert any noun, verb, adverb or adjective of your choice and your
story is as good and as accurate as the next guy's.
And libs are indeed going slowly mad over this NSA wiretapping scandal that should come as no surprise to anyone that cheered on Bush and the USA PATRIOT Act,
such as Edward Snowden's Boswell, the self-serving, hypocritical,
Cato-loving tool Glenn Greenwald, hereafter referred to as "the other
John Aravosis." They're torn between throwing under their short buses
the President they've been inexplicably cheering on since 2008 and
actually siding with Rand Paul and the Teabaggers who are raising some
serious questions as to the surveillance state we've been living under
since the tip of that first plane's nose touched the World Trade
Center's north tower. There's a slowly growing but a growing consensus
nonetheless that perhaps Snowden's motives are not pure, that perhaps he
was lying about the NSA and local cops visiting his girlfriend at their
house in Hawaii from which they'd apparently vacated last May 1st when
the owner wanted to sell. Now we're hearing revelations that he's been in touch with Chinese authorities
and informing them of tens of thousands of ongoing hacks we've been
aiming at that regime, as if it's a huge surprise to them we're doing
unto them what they've been doing unto us for decades.
So,
yes, let us cease to seriously listen to the utterly worthless corporate
mainstream media and our equally utterly worthless corporate
government that lies to us hundreds if not thousands of times daily but
let us also distrust tools such as Glenn Greenwald, who'd become almost
as infamous and notorious this past week as Snowden himself. Greenwald,
though he may have pretensions as a serious journalist that's further
egged on by paying gigs at Salon.com and the Guardian.co.uk, has forgotten the cardinal sin of journalism: Don't become the story. When you do that, we have to endurelittle territorial squabbles
(over a guy who has no loyalty to either) made further ridiculous and
minimized on a social networking site called "Twitter" between Greenwald
and the WaPo's Barton Gellman, who was allegedly first contacted
by Snowden then backed out when Gellman refused to commit to a 72 hour
turnaround time on the exposé (Greenwald tweets back like an irritated parakeet that no, he'd been secretly working with Snowden since last February.).
As massive unearthed conspiracies generally do, it's become as much if
not more about the leaker, his character and that of Greenwald, with the
media frenzy turned like a rabid dog snapping at shadows and its own
tail while completely forgetting about the central story, the one to
which we all ought to be paying attention: That the government is spying
on us and the Obama administration and Obama himself lying to our faces
by saying we're not the targets, after all, and that this NSA
warrantless wiretapping program is aimed only at non-Americans,
comrades.
That's the real story. Not him.
Yet, if you were to do a Google search on Snowden's full name,
you would find much more often than not the story is about him, this
year's Bradley Manning, even though the kangaroo court presiding over
Bradley Manning's trial has just convened. We just can't seem to make up
our minds about Edward Snowden. The New Yorker says he's a hero. The New Yorker says he's not
a hero (although anyone who seriously entertains for a nanosecond what
Jeffery Toobin writes ought to be flogged with a cat-o-nine tails laced
with Tabasco sauce). The erstwhile liberal rag Slate even openly asks if Snowden is a traitor while others under that same masthead straddle the fence and ask if he's a hero or a villain. In fact, the usually stuffy and conservative magazine Forbes has gone all Tiger Beat and actually tells us what Edward Snowden was like as a teeenager.
Eyes on the prize, peeps, or what passes for a brass ring these days.
This massive surveillance state, which again should come as no surprise
to anyone who can remember back to October 26th 2001 when the USA
PATRIOT Act was "ratified" after Republicans slipped into the bill in
the dead of night and pulling a switcheroo after making the US Printing
Office pull an allnighter language that dramatically altered the already
fascist content. And no one, especially Greenwald, who openly
championed the USA PATRIOT Act in books, the media, the Congressional
Record or even on their blog has the right to any degree of outrage that
this is happening today.The New York Times
dropped the bombshell back on December 16, 2005 that warrantless
wiretapping and the circumvention of Jimmy Carter's FISA courts had been
going on since 9/11 if not before. The Bush administration then
sheepishly admitted that, yeah, we were spying on just a few of you
through the telephone companies that's gouging you every month in your
home and cell phone bills. Then we found out it was more like tens if
not hundreds of thousands. George W. Bush was even kind enough to tell
us, once the shit hit the fan, exactly how the spying program worked and
that he'd reauthorized through Executive Orders the same thing 45 more
times.
That Obama, a man who has quietly and infamously
defended the war criminals of the Bush administration sprinted off the
campaign trail to cast a vote giving telcoms retroactive immunity for
spying on us, thereby putting the kibosh on almost four dozen lawsuits,
should actually expand this fascist police state left to him by Bush
should come as no surprise to liberals. The man, after all, openly lied
to us and informed us while defending the program that this wide net
shown to us by Snowden was not aimed at American citizens when that same
man ordered the deaths of at least five Americans through his drone
strike assassination program.
I keep saying it until I'm blue
in the face and I do not care how many times I'm ignored. But Bob Barr,
former Georgia congressman, warned us that if you give government
power, it will use it.
The current zeitgeist is, If Obama doesn't dismantle this program now,
then he will leave this invasive police state to a real tyrant. What
people like Lee Camp and the Rude Pundit cannot bring themselves to admit is that Obama is that tyrant of the future.
And if you're tempted to laugh about that, then go ahead. But while
you're struggling to catch your breath and wipe your eyes, let me ask
you: How long do you think you'll be able to protest the Obama
administration or anything regarding the government if you were to do so
before a federal building, or near someone who happens to have Secret
Service protection (did you even know that Obama quietly signed the 2013 version into law
less than a month ago without even being concerned about indefinitely
detaining US citizens or is that still somehow less noxious than Bush's
USA PATRIOT Act)? I'd give you less than 60 seconds. Maybe 30.
You mad libs may condescendingly laugh at charges that your hero is a
tyrant with one jackboot out of the closet but the first thing a tyrant
thinks while getting up in the morning (aside from pissing not into a
toilet but on the heads of the poor and working class) is how to
suppress dissent. And this is what the Obama administration has done
since Day One. Hence the National Defense Authorization Act. Hence the
uninterrupted renewals of Bush's USA PATRIOT Act.
Hence the other unavoidable fact that, by April last year, the Obama administration had gone after more whistleblowers than the previous 43 administrations combined.
And what addlepated Teabaggers and liberals don't have the wits to ask
as they worry about which side of the gridiron their shifting positions
on Snowden, the NSA and Obama will land them is, "Why do we have so many whistleblowers to persecute and prosecute in the hallowed name of national security?"
Our completely worthless AG Eric Holder pretty much confirmed in so
many words what we're already all suspecting: That justice is reserved
not for the Wall Street criminals Holder only pretends to investigate, criminals that snuggle up to and worm their way into the Obama administration like so many succubi.
And the Obama administration has also told us in so many words that
justice is not for the war criminals who shot and killed innocent Iraqi
civilians in 2007.
The Obama junta's public record shows that
our laws and so-called justice is reserved for people like Bradley
Manning who told us of the war crimes being committed in our good names
and with our hard-earned tax dollars. It's arrogantly told us in so many
words and deeds that "justice" is reserved for Occupy activists (whom Obama can't distinguish
from the screaming, racist psychopaths of the Tea Bagger movement) who
protested the actions of the same exact people infesting Obama's
thoroughly rotten administration like silverfish in a derelict Louisiana
bayou fishing shack.
People, brothers and sisters, fellow
Americans on both sides of the Great Ideological Divide, we have met the
enemy and it is us. So saith the man who wants to take away your Social
Security and Medicare to appease the same cryptofascists who got us
into this mess. Obama doesn't want to take away your guns and he has
absolutely no interest in you getting affordable health care. He said
one thing and did everything the complete opposite the nanosecond he
took his greasy paw off Lincoln's Bible on January 20, 2009.
So, no. Edward Snowden is neither a hero nor a villain any more than
Glenn Greenwald's an actual journalist. Snowden was, like Daniel
Ellsberg, a man who found himself in the middle of a massive web of lies
and crimes that detrimentally affected innocent lives and furthermore
found that he was as much a part of the problem as the panicking
psychopaths who are now pursuing him over hill and dale. Finding
yourself in an intolerable, untenable situation and reacting in a way
that'll permit you to sleep at night is not heroism, whatever you
sacrifice. It's called survival.
Let us never cease asking ourselves: "Why do we have so many whistleblowers and what are they trying to tell us that we should know but do not?"

"...the first thing a tyrant thinks while getting up in the morning (aside from pissing not into a toilet but on the heads of the poor and working class) is how to suppress dissent. And this is what the Obama administration has done since Day One. "

Well, he hasn't repressed Republican dissent. He hasn't repressed the dissent of the budget ceiling squeezers, the medicare meanies, the Social Security slicers, the food stamp haters, and more.

For that matter, he hasn't even repressed you and me. Not yet, anyway.

Indeed. The government may not intend to suppress dissent using this massive pile of data. But simply having the ability to suppress dissent with this massive pile of data means it will happen. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, even. But it will happen. Because this massive pile of data is power, and power corrupts. That is the nature of the beast. You put this power into the hands of government, and it will be used.

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